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RED POPPIES 




GENERAL PERSHING AT SANDRICOURT 



RED POPPIES 



BY 



DAVID RHODES SPARKS 




CAMBRIDGE 
Privately Printed at 






COPYRIGHT, I918, BY DAVID RHODES SPARKS 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



OCT 28/9/8 



©Gi.Annn'MJI 



'V-LQ 



TO THE LORD AND MASTER OF ENGLISH 12 
CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND 

WHOSE JOVML CURSING AND TRUE GREATNESS 

HAVE MADE MANY OF THE AUTHORS 

OF A GENERATION 



BATTLEFIELDS 
AND POPPIES 

Some time after this book had gone to press, 
I found a small article in an obscure enough 
corner of the Chicago Tribune, The brevity 
with which the clipping presents a strange 
fact, and the explanation which it gives my 
own title, have caused me to omit the preface 
I had intended and print instead the news- 
paper article. 

"Apparently there is a strange relation ex- 
isting between battlefields and wild flowers. 
Macaulay tells how after the battle of Landen, 
in the Netherlands, in 1693, between the 
French army and the English army under 
King William III, where more than twenty 
thousand men were left unburied on the field, 
the soil broke forth the following year into 
millions upon millions of scarlet poppies, cov- 
ering the entire battlefield as if with a vast 
sheet of rich blood. An identically similar 
occurrence is reported to have taken place 
120 years later in the same region, when in 
the summer of the year following the victory 



[ viii ] 
of Waterloo the entire battlefield was ablaze 
with scarlet poppies. The same springing up 
of scarlet poppies everywhere on the battle- 
fields, some months after the battle, is taking 
place in France in the present war." 



ILLUSTRA.TIONS 

General Pershing at Sandricourt Frontispiece 

David Rhodes Sparks i2v/ 

The Hope of France 20 / 

Chambrouilliat Valley, in Sight of the 

Trenches 36 

When they had gone 52 

Verdun, August 20, 19 17 64 

The beginning of the French drive 
The Abri at Citerne Marceau . . . .72*^ 
Laheycourt 82 >/ 



RED POPPIES 



RED POPPIES 



At Sea^ S.S, Esfagne 

Saturday^ May 12, 1917 

Day after day has hovered peacefully above a 
barren ocean. Morning uncovers only a mo- 
notony of blue and white and white and blue, 
and night curtains down so heavily that the 
steamer is lost like a grey flea floating in a tub 
of black paint. 

Now, we are swinging up into the danger 
zone. But fear fights into our hearts with diffi- 
culty, for college men just freed from the terror 
of June " finals" find in impending danger from 
submarines only a zest which lends more life to 
their songs and card-playing. Sometimes — in 
the late night, perhaps — one does feel a little 
strain in the noise and goes on deck into the 
blackness and a half fog. The water licks and 
sighs, and the phosphorescence of the wake 
flames in a beacon, like a trail of burning oil. 
But if the picture stings for a moment, loung- 
ing again in a great chair, one finds immediate 



[4] 

antidote for it in the ripples of talk and the 
heavy blue air of the smoking-saloon. Laugh- 
ter is all that is real, and night and fear hover 
about only as a dream. 

Last night I stood forward on the boat deck 

talking with T , when, perhaps fifty yards 

out and quartering toward us just at midship, 
we saw a golden streak flashing in the water. 
The thing tore forward, without wavering, 
at a terrific rate. Neither of us spoke. We 
waited. . . .Three seconds, perhaps; and when 
the streak was ten feet clear of our side it 
.ducked back and sank into the water out of 
sight! A porpoise, I suppose. 

Preparations for attack are not many. The 
boats are swung clear, and certain instructions 
regarding emergency disembarking have been 
posted on the bulletin board. Late this after- 
noon a fleet of four transports convoyed by as 
many destroyers passed close by us. But we 
shall go through unprotected, and now again 
are sailing alone. 

2 A.M., Tuesday, May 15 

A heavy fog at dawn yesterday morning, 
clinging over us until about eleven. We lay 
at anchor, and when the sun shone out, oflf to 



[S] 

the left stretched the land. Creeping into the 
mouth of the Gironde, the steamer swung idle 
to wait for the afternoon tide. On one side 
of the bay stretched a village of white houses 
topped by a church spire. Across, a lighthouse 
squared up above low, wind-pushed trees, with 
beyond it soft green hills, the ruin of some old 
tower, and still other church spires. 

At dusk we moved again, the muddy river 
unfolding in long bends. We passed a dimly 
lighted town. Surging with life and sizzling 
with white light, a huge munitions plant slipped 
by, and further on lay the dull barracks of 
a prison camp. Almost drifting, the steamer 
edged around a last bend and at midnight be- 
gan to work into a low quay under her own 
power. Below us men shouted in French, and 
beyond the glare of the docks a street lined 
with French houses lay half visible. We went 
below to get our luggage then, for we are go- 
ing ashore in Bordeaux in three hours ! 



II 

Paris 

Mo7iday^ May 21, 191 7 

You who know Paris have lived in a city far 
different from our own. Down the Opera two 
squares a crooked street comes in — rue d'An- 
tin. Up the rue d'Antin, a hundred yards, 
stands the Hotel d'Antin, which is the man- 
sion of a full-waisted beaming man, who wears 
the same smile alike when he greets soldiers 
newly come to Paris and when he takes his last 
seven francs from some permissionnaire who 

has overstayed leave. Monsieur W 's smile 

holds meaning enough, and plainly indicates 
the conditions of our Paris. 

Paris is //;zmoral. Whether he follow it or 
no, here there remains onl}^ one standard for 
the actions of a soldier. Poilus disappear into 
the veiled glamour of Montmartre, and officers 
go to the Crillon — so Paris says, and there 
the matter is finished. 

But the problem is not so easily forgotten 
by us whom it affects. Barred from the inter- 
esting places which, are closed during the War, 



[7] 

left idle and half lonely in a new city to wan- 
der about its too gay streets, and, worse than 
being shunned, gazed at in all places with a 
suggestive tolerance, small wonder if any one 
of us plunge into the wilderness and freedom 
simply to forget the loathing which such con- 
ditions excite. 

You will not wonder if I have been very 
gloomy these days. 

For the rest — few things about us make 
one think of War. One becomes accustomed 
to the endless uniforms, and War is so old here 
that it might have existed always. Of want, 
nothing shows. Black bread, simple food, and 
scrupulous care against waste may all indicate 
a wise conservation, but certainly never have 
we needed more luxury than was given us. 
Cafes and public places are closed in the even- 
ing at half-past nine, and the streets are dark- 
ened save for occasional lights along the boule- 
vards. But the springtime floods everything, 
and throngs of laughing, chattering people 
wandering aboutthrough the early night banish 
all sense of dreariness. To be sure, every circle 
is heavy with dresses of mourning, as are seen 
mutilated, pitiful creatures on the streets. But 
of paupers I have seen nothing, and save for 



[8] 

jtist a tinge of forced gaiety, the people live 

their normal lives bravely, cheerfully, and un- 

conquered. 

Saturday, May 26 

Since my unhappy summing up last Sunday 
of our forced surroundings, I have found the 
opera. Now, though the unpleasant things and 
dangers are none the less real, the new pleas- 
ure offers beauty enough to offset them count- 
less times. To-night I heard Thais at the Opera 
Nationale — a performance more magnificent 
than any I have ever attended in America. 
And the past evenings have held other operas 
just as glorious; Madame Butterfly, Cavalleria 
Rusticana, Lakme, Faust, and twice, the Rus- 
sian Ballet. 

All classes of people, I find, go to the opera, 
and no disgrace attaches to a seat in the third 
or fourth gallery, where one may obtain a 
place, admitting of perfect sight and hearing, 
for four or five francs. In the long intervals 
between acts, too, when the splendidly dressed 
people walk about like pigmies in the vast, 
gorgeous promenade hall of the theatre, the 
barriers against the soldiers, if ever, are thrown 
aside, and one again may reckon himself a 
gentleman. Is it not strange how one motive 



[9] 

of beauty can reconcile one's mind to so much 
that is unbeautiful ? 

We have seen many places, but for the most 
part those of an unusual sort. Last Wednes- 
day in the afternoon, T and I paid a three- 
cent fare and mounted the Seine in a squatty 
boat to where the river leaves Paris and an am- 
bling little old village and breaks up over a dam 
to bask and crawl lazily through the green 
of open fields and the dancing amber of sun- 
sprinkled woods. Leaving the boat, we wan- 
dered beneath great, dusky trees to follow a 
canal all alive with gaily painted wooden-shoe 
house-boats, and came finally to a cafe that 
might have antedated Louis XIV. Here we 
had chocolate and soon were moving down 
the river into the sunset. Landing, we passed 
the squat, dingy morgue and stopped a moment 
in Notre Dame. It was very beautiful there in 
the rose glow of light that trembled through 
the exquisite high windows. I had never seen 
Notre Dame before. But a grumbling guard 
came with a clanking bunch of great kej^s, and 
we were driven into the street again to move 
with the afternoon crowds until seven o'clock. 
Then dinner, and out again soon to all the 
colour and music of the Ballet. 



[ lo] 

Our present delay in being sent to the Front 
is because of a shortage of ambulances, and 
we are to go into the country presently to set 
up a training camp where we may fit ourselves 
for action. The change, I fancy, will come 
before I write again. 



Ill 

Sandr {courts Oise 

Friday^ June i, 191 7 

We heard the sound of guns to-night. After 
a long day's work at fixing our quarters, we 
were walking in the dusk and had stopped to 
rest upon a low rise at the edge of a field. It 
was very still. From far off came echoing and 
distinct the staccato of a voice calling; all 
about us fell the last day song of many birds. 
Very, very faintly, from far to the left, trem- 
bled a dull rumble — concussions like the 
sound of two stones struck together under 
water. We lay listening a long while, until 
finally night drowned the softness of twilight; 
and with thoughts as sombre as the darkness, 
we walked slowly back to camp. 

The new life is splendid. Fancy making 
military quarters from grey, moss-grown farm 
buildings three centuries old! Built adjoining 
each other in the form of a hollow square, the 
long peasant's house, the barns, and the gran- 
aries stand grouped about a central court, 
and make even now a farm property of no 



[12] 

mean size. I live with nine others on the 
second floor of the house in a big room which 
is bare save for our cots and the decoration 
of a ceiling beamed with hand-hewn, black- 
ened timbers of oak. But a swallow's nest 
filled with cheeping youngsters clings in one 
corner, and occasionally a sparrow pufls up 
and jabbers at us from the window ledge. 
And through the window gleams a stretch of 
wooded hill country that slides down on one 
side into a vast open colour box of sun-soaked 
barley fields, dark splashes of trees, and vil- 
lages blue beneath haze. 

Monday evening 

Work began in earnest to-day. Our squad 
of forty men is the first to be sent into train- 
ing camp, and the task is before us of making 
Sandricourt both suitable for ourselves and 
the men to follow us. The barns and gran- 
aries — which will have to be used as quarters 
as more units arrive — are in great need of 
cleaning and repair, besides which the court is 
so uneven and grass-grown that it is useless 
as a drill ground. 

For two hours this afternoon we did what 
was possible to set up a system of drill. Un- 




DAVID RHODES SPARKS 



[13] 

fortunately, T , P , and I are the only 

liien who have had military training enough 
to be able to teach anything, and the greatest 
part of the work falls upon us. But every 
man goes into the ordeal with a spirit which 
bids fair to bring him success even without 
teaching. 

The camp is in charge of a Colonel W , 

a retired British army officer, and Lieutenant 

P , detailed to us from the French army. 

These officers live in the chateau of the San- 
dricourt estate; while at present, the only 
officer at camp is one of the men from Sec- 
tion V who has been detailed here tempo- 
rarily. . . . 

The first American mails are in. To guess 
at the meaning of that is all that you can do, 
for I could never tell you what lay in our 
hearts as the big packet was sorted and dis- 
tributed. I am wondering if I am not a little 
homesick this evening. The greatness of these 
days would banish any real pain. But this 
afternoon, dizzy with heat, my throat raw 
from shouting, I closed my eyes a moment 
and saw the cool of a porch, the shade of 
awnings, white walks glowing under big trees, 



[ 14 ] 

drops of water shining on freshly sprinkled 
lawns — and I thought of you at home in 
June. It will be good to be home in June 
again. 



IV 



Sandricourt 
Thursday^ June 7, 1917 

Two new squads of men have come to us, 
and the days move about one continuous drill. 

P and T have been obliged to help 

with the work in the office, which has left 
only me to break in the new men. All of 
them work marvellously, however, and three 
companies are taking shape splendidly. 

About a hundred and fifty men are in camp 
now, with signs of another lot after the arrival 
of the next steamer. Imagine our bustle and 
activity. From the barn roofs much vener- 
able moss is being scraped and replaced by 
plaster to hold out rain, the grey walls have 
lost all appearance of antiquity beneath a vivid 
coat of whitewash, and the outside woodwork 
flames with red paint. Shower baths and an 
adequate place where we may wash yet re- 
main unfinished, but the court is cleared and 
levelled and a great vegetable garden planted. 

This afternoon all of us got formed in col- 
umn somehow, and moved off on a long road 



[i6] 

march. Ununiformed still, the men strung 
out into a line hectic with blue overalls, multi- 
coloured shirts, and civilian trousers, made 
indeed a queer appearance. Still, had you 
heard us singing and seen the peasants leave 
their fields to watch the Americans, you 
should have accorded us much respect. 

It is raining this evening very softly with 
the sun trying to make a brave setting be- 
hind. The little group of people far down 
the road, the shimmering fields, the faint song 
of a cuckoo seem almost make believe, so ex- 
quisite is all the detail. Indeed, in the quiet 
of dusk, the land might well be only a mar- 
vellous painting. One would grow restless 
in the fineness of it all were it not for the 
sky. 

Sunday^ June lO 
After an entire morning of inspection, our 
chief officers have just returned to Paris, leav- 
ing the camp in riot. A new section is to go 
into the field at once. Which means that the 
men will discuss all night the problem of 
which of them will be picked. More excite- 
ment is surging about than humdrum Sandri* 
court has yet known. 



[17] 

But the wildly arguing groups have for- 
gotten me. T , P , and the rest of our 

room are in the hallway almost shouting while 
I am perched here on the window-sill writ- 
ing alone. And all because Captain N 

wishes some one who has been here since 
Sandricourt opened to remain and carry on 

the military work. T is, I think, to be 

second in command of the new section and 

cannot remain, and P refuses to be held. 

That I should have been picked, I suppose, 
will seem an excellent stroke of fortune to 
you. Just now, however, I am more forlorn 
and acutely miserable than anybody can im- 
agine. 

I had rather not write any more now. Of 
course, everything will come right, and I 
ought to see what a splendid position has 
been given me. I shall see soon, I think, 

when the other excitement quiets. B and 

S , two Harvard graduates, have been put 

in charge of the camp, and will manage the 
office while I do the military work. After the 
bitterness of being held back has worn away 
a little, we shall be settled and happy enough. 
And, just perhaps, I shall have to remain only 
temporarily. 



[ i8] 

The group in the hall has partly broken 
up, and the few men left have changed their 
tones to confidential whisperings of "inside 
information." ... I wish I were with them. 



Sandricourt 
Wednesday^ June 13, 1917 

Sandricourt this week bears the name of 
the " rubber hotel." We seem to have a limit- 
less stretching capacity for guests. 

Fifty more men came to us Monday out of 
a furious rainstorm. Owing to the unstable 
habits of their makeshift tent quarters, they 
have never got dry since. Things are pretty 

bad. Some scandalmonger had it that L , a 

certain multimillionaire, poured so much wa- 
ter from his boots, yesterday morning, that he 
was able to wash his face without going to the 
well! I can't prove the story, but I do know 
that four middle-aged gentlemen, of whom 

L is one, are showing a spirit through 

these miserable days that is worth copying. 
So, crowded quarters, water, cold, and all, we 
are still happy and keep up in fine shape. 

If the black mud ever grows stable enough 
to walk over, we shall begin work again. Now, 
the hours have to pass with as little cursing as 
idleness, wet food, wet beds, wet clothing, and 



[20] 

a wet skin will allow. But the sun will bake 
things out some time, and we shall go back to 
the comfortable, full days of work and our 
walks at dusk. 

The most pleasant place to which we walk 
is a tiny hamlet about a mile down the main 
road. A blank wall stretches across one side 
of the village, and approach from the road is 
cut off save by following a little path which 
meanders off through a field to come up with 
a jerk before the town pump. Here, a few peo- 
ple always are sitting about to bid one a pleas- 
ant" Bonsoir ! " While wanderingon, one is apt 
at any time of the day or evening nearly to be 
bowled over by a laughing crowd of children 
who jump from behind some house shouting 
in unison a great " Good day ! " To carry out 
which ceremony, the least one can do is to 
take the whole group of youngsters on to the 
store and give each a mug of sticky raspberry 
syrup and a bit of chocolate. 

In the warmth of these summer evenings, 
the doors and windows of the homes are 
opened upon interiors as fresh and clean as 
tidy doll's houses, and white-capped old women 
and a few bent, aged men sit upon the door- 
steps in the last sunshine. We are the first 



[21 ] 

Americans ever to come to Courcelles. And 
the old people welcome us; some place is 
always vacant where we may sit and smoke 
while we talk a little. Resting there, perhaps 
some youngster crawls up into one's lap to be 
fed chocolate, or the grave, tired old men tell 
of the first wild rush of War, of the days when 
all of the men had gone, of the work and sad- 
ness now, — and yet always, too, something 
of the good things that are left them. . . . 
The evenings that pass so are the pleasantest 
I have known. 

Sunday 

The latest arrival is a hair-clipper. Oh, of 
all the shorn lambs, the ragged, tattered heads 
of hair! One community has never before 
realized the devastation that a single un- 
guarded instrument of the barber's art can 
wreak. The clipper is held in leash now and 

used only by one J . But the carnage 

wrought by Victor Hugo's brass cannon 
broken loose on the deck of a rolling frigate 
was never worse than our slaughter of inno- 
cents when the clipper was abroad. 

Surely, from that description, you will have 
guessed that the sun is flaming again, and that 
all 's well with the world. 



[22] 

Arriving without warning, Friday, among 
our crowd of overalled, sweaty day labourers, 
a group of American staff officers and our 
own chiefs from Paris demanded an immedi- 
ate inspection of camp. We are granted ten 
minutes. Hatless and in undershirts, men 
came trooping to the parade ground from 
painting, ditch-digging, road-mending. A hor- 
rible sight! But we fell in and stood fast for 
review. The group of officers passed down the 
lines. Not a man wavered, not a single hand 

nor eye moved. Major M stopped before 

the right guide of the second company, star- 
ing at every inch of his muddy boots and over- 
alls and face and bare head. But the guide 
had as well been dead for any movement he 
made. We had learned Discipline! 

Surely staying in the rear to help with such 
work as that is worth its cost. 



VI 

Sandricourt 
Sunday^ June 24, 191 7 

Just at breakfast-time Friday morning a squad 
of Boche prisoners stopped in a field close by 
to run a threshing machine. Six of them there 
were — heavy-faced, sullen men who made 
croaking noises in their throats like animals. 
Dumb-eyed, lethargic in their servitude, their 
whole demeanour made them not unlike ani- 
mals. One of them swore vilely at our cook 
as she was giving them bread — but swore, 
perhaps, excusably. Just to excite curses 
Madame was making taunting remarks about 
the generosity of the French. For the French 
think it an honour to be reviled by a German. 
They feel that the lower they stand in Teu- 
tonic estimation, the more good is there in 
them. And truly, I believe now it is an excel- 
lent doctrine. 

I could understand much of what the pris- 
oners said. One or two spoke unpleasant 
things. With a far-away light flickering in his 
eyes, another babbled senselessly. Talking 



[Hi 

dully, they answered a few of our questions. 
— Yes, they lived in comfortable quarters, 
were fed well, and treated excellently. They 
would much rather be prisoners than return 
to the trenches. The War is horrible — cut 
off from reserves, they had been bombarded 
without rest for fifteen days before their divi- 
sion, depleted to eighteen thousand, fell. — 
Small nothings of information, I expect, but 
what they say of their treatment is true. At 
the big Boche concentration camp close by 
here, I vow that the prisoners fare on better 
rations than do we. 

The other days of the week have passed 
in a drab monotony of work. I drill always. 
For Section 6i goes out to-morrow, and I 
have been forced to keep working to forget 

that. T , P , all the men with whom 

I crossed will be gone. 

Last night, however. Lieutenant P in- 
vited T , B , S , and me to dine 

with him and Doctor M at the chateau. 

We drove over in the ambulance, and at seven, 
dinner was served in the long hall of the hunt- 
ing-lodge. Sparkling through the west win- 
dows, the sun gave us light enough ; and after 
rations of soup, stewed meat, black bread, and 



[25] 

acid wine, the white table and huge napkins, 
the delicately roasted beef and yellow butter, 

and Lieutenant P 's champagne from 

Rheims, made indeed a banquet. In the eve- 
ning we sat under the trees with our cigar- 
ettes and liqueur in the early silver of the new 
moon. A field gramophone poured out abom- 
inable American ragtime, and the soft odour 
of a blooming tilleul grove fell about us. But 
the heavy guns in front muttered dully. 

To-day Mr. K from Paris visited with 

his daughter ; and poor B had to talk 

business to Mr. K while S and I 

played hosts to the daughter! We showed her 
all the camp including William and the Crown 
Prince, our two little pigs, and even photo- 
graphed the hair-clipper in action — the lat- 
ter, because Miss K announced that she 

had purchased the machine as her donation 
to the camp. Woman is a great civilizer. 
Were it not for woman, man would revert to 
whiskers and carry a club. 



VII 

Sandricourt 
Thursday^ July 5, 191 7 

Section 6i has gone, and with such a glori- 
ous departure that I have not since found 
courage to tell you of it. Early in the morning 
the field kits lay in a great heap in the court- 
yard. Trim in new uniforms, laughing and 
shouting, the section men stood among us 
taking theiriare wells. The trumpeter sounded 
assembly, and the section fell in. But roll-call 
would have been an insult. Absences indeed ! 

Colonel W made inspection, after which 

T took charge, and the camp cheered the 

section, and the section cheered the camp, all 

until we were deafened. As T called the 

men up, a sharp silence held; and — "Right 
by Squads! . . . March!" The line broke 
into column, to pass singing through the arch- 
way. 

Since that time the days have been all alike. 
I have followed out a cadet system in our 
work, and we run monotonously in routine. 
Up at half-past six, drill at seven; after break- 



[27] 

fast, drill and work until a two-hour recess at 
noon; and again work and drill until five 
o'clock, when we are free until nine o'clock 
parade and taps at ten. We have accomplished 
a great deal. The grounds and buildings are 
completely transformed; and the men who 
straggled into camp in ragged squads, can go 
through formal parade without a fault now. 
But day upon day of the sweating and shout- 
ing, and always the staying back, eats vi- 
ciously into one's heart. 

One break has come, however, that will 
flame in the forehead of all History. Twenty 
of us spent yesterday in Paris — the Fourth 
of July. 

Our troops paraded there in the morning. 
In brown and blue regiments, companies flung 
out into line, bands pulsing, both soldiers and 
sailors marched along the boulevards that 
were flanked by a vast press of people and 
overhung by buildings wrapped in the colours 
of America. . . . 

Ah, but our train was so late that we could 
only be told of the sight. Yet what matter? 
The Americans remained, and Parisians do 
not think the less of a fete day because its 
ceremonies are completed. So, happy enough, 



[28] 

I shopped for a bit in the morning, dined 
magnificently, and went in the cool of the 
afternoon to get my American mail and walk 
about the streets. 

Our own flag flew everywhere — alone in 
places, sometimes hung with all the Allied 
flags. What glory to see it so! Gay uniforms, 
vivid as the sheen of a fresh rainbow, flashed 
everywhere, flashing beside them the faces 
of uncounted beautiful women. And moving 
through the whole picture strolled the Sam- 
mies that left one's heart joyous as the echo- 
ing laughter in his ears. 

Presently, down by the Tuileries, I met 

Major Mc who had been among the staff 

officers that visited Sandricourt ten days ago. 
Fancy, if you can, the happiness I felt as 
he returned my salute, recognized me, and 
asked me to walk with him. I am sure now 
that we poor mortals never outgrow Hero 
Worship. 

At a little cafe in the rue d'Antin I stopped 
to read my mail. As a special concession — 
because of the fete, I suppose — the waitress 
placed some bits of ice in my lemonade. I 
felt very much set up. Next my table sat 
two Belgians with bits of starred and striped 



[29] 

ribbon on their tunics — one of the soldiers 
with his face gashed by a horrible half-healed 
scar. Swirling across the mouth of the quiet 
side street, crowds of people moved up and 
down the Opera in an eddying current of 
greasy, huge, black Singhalese soldiers, brown 
Anamites, Belgians, poilus. Tommies, and 
just a few trim jackies. . , . Letters from 
home struck strangely in that place, and you 
seemed very, very far away for a while. 

At six I had dinner with two sailors, and 
so back to the Gare du Nord again to take 
charge of the men. 

Sunday^ July 8 

Truly this week has passed as one of cele- 
bration. A seriously wounded young lieuten- 
ant with whom we have become acquainted 
is convalescing in his mother's home just be- 
yond Courcelles. We have called upon Ma- 
dame and young D , and both have visited 

our camp; and yesterday brought an invita- 
tion for B , S , and me to dine with 

them last evening. 

The arrival of dinner guests in a grey am- 
bulance might excite comment at home, but 
here it is quite swagger. The real novelty 



[3o] 

came when we rang an electric bell again. 
Dinner ran through some seven courses, fol- 
lowing which Madame D , her sister, 

D , and the three of us walked in what 

D called " the garden," But the plot was 

a kilometre square, and more than being over- 
grown with banks of flowers, was partially 
covered with a forest of the most magnificent 
oaks I have ever seen. 

Madame D discovering in us a fond- 
ness for a kind of sponge cake which she has, 
we returned to the chateau about ten to be fed 
with her delicacy. A queer hour to be served 
sponge cake and tea; but one has forgotten 
many queer things now, and until nearly 
midnight we had the gayest, happiest time 
imaginable. 

The drawing-room, with its fifteen-foot 
ceiling and heavy furniture, was softened to 
candle gleam, and seemed half the shadow of 
a dream as we sat talking. The strange re- 
placements and confusions of the past months 
are vivid at such a time. I might have imag- 
ined myself in the South of the Civil War, 
or a stray knight in a fairy story. But cer- 
tainly such an evening never was given out 
to fill the run of ordinary life. 



[31 ] 

Just one scrap more. Perhaps — only per- 
haps something is going to happen to me 
soon. I dare not tell you of it yet, but may 
possibly in my next letter. I am tremen- 
dously happy and excited. 



VIII 

Sandricourt 
Sunday^ July 15, 1917 

I AM Going to the Front ! There, after 
waiting a week. I have small explanation — 
I could have stayed here no longer, and a 
man has come whom Captain N is will- 
ing to have take charge in my place. Surely 
the six weeks here have been a wonderful 
training for me. I am infinitely more master 
of myself for them. But my opportunity has 
come, and it is better that I go. 

The men in 61 have just left Dijon with 
their cars, and now are in the Vosges Sector 
where I shall join them upon the arrival of 

Mr. K 's order, — perhaps to-morrow, 

perhaps in a week. 

Sandricourt closed for me with the climax 
of a fairy tale. General Pershing reviewed 
us here last Thursda}^! That day held no 
confusion nor unreadiness. The ceremonies 
passed through faultlessly; and you can wager 

that when, after review, Colonel W 

called me away from my battalion and pre- 
sented me to the General, my head was spin- 



[33] 

ning as though some one were holding an 

ether sponge beneath my nose. Then B , 

S , and I were with the gentlemen as we 

had inspection of quarters. Now — oh, well, 
I cannot think of much else — I shall say it 
again. I am going to the Front! 

Yesterday, on the French holiday — the 
Fall of the Bastille — I drove the camion in 
the morning to the place about thirty kilo- 
metres from here where we get supplies. 
Returning, we had breakfast in a low, black 
little room of a cafe. The French sergeant 
who was with me had been humming during 
the meal of sausage, bread, and wine, and 
finishing eating, he stood and proposed a toast 
to France. We drank, and the sergeant re- 
mained standing. A roar of applause burst 
from the soldiers about. Then the man sang 
— a song of Verdun which seemed to lift the 
close walls about us and fling them aside, 
and leave our hearts surging with a crashing 
^' Jamais I "... I find now that the man is one 
of the greatest tenors of the Opera Nationale. 

Truly this is an insane letter, but the best 
I can make. Do not worry about me. I shall 
be safe, and this thing is more fit for triumph 
than any mite of fear. 



IX 

£n route Paris to the Front 

In a baggage car^ on the floor 
Sunday^ July 22, 1917 

Excitement, fear, and weariness are the three 
greatest emotions in war. In time, the weari- 
ness eats out the excitement and fear, and is 
left alone. 

We have just seen this in pitiful illustration, 
I think. All afternoon a poilu has been talking 
with us as we lounged here on the floor of the 
car. Returning from leave he was, with his 
conversation still full of Paris, his wife, his 
baby. Yet he spoke of these things with the 
same dispassionate dulness with which he told 
of the trenches. Leaving his world of bright- 
ness to return to a world of death, our soldier 
— a university graduate, a husband, a father 
—felt no more emotion than had come when, 
eight days ago, he went from the trenches to 
the glory of home. . . . Ten minutes ago he 
left the car at a little shed of a station and 
walked away over a torn hillside dotted with 
crosses. 



[35 ] 

With A J , I have been travelling 

since yesterday morning early, but still our 
section remains a will-o'-the-wisp. Leaving 
Paris, it seemed that getting to the Front would 
mean merely climbing into our train and wait- 
ing until we were thrown out. So it did happen 
until we reached Fere-en-Tardenois at noon. 
Then a most courteous officer informed us that 
he had never heard of Section 6i. With his 
promise, however, that he would attempt to 
find our proper destination, we went off into 
the village to find some sort of a lunch. 

Hotels and cafes stood about in numbers, 
but with doors locked and their dusty interiors 
quite empty. Presently, however, a grinning 
poilu hailed us in perfect English, and after 
listening to our forlorn tale he took us to a 
house whose mistress he persuaded to give us 
eggs, veal cutlets, fried potatoes, salad, and 
jam. Excellent man! 

After lunch we walked over a couple of 
kilometres of shell-pits and dusty, unkempt 
waste to a sixteenth-century chateau which 
lay beyond the village. There, it was beauti- 
ful, but very strange in the peace of the cen- 
turies-old forest to be forever shaken by the 
heavy guns. 



[36-\ 

As we returned in the late afternoon, a lieu- 
tenant in a camion picked us up. In Fere once 
more we met two Americans from the ammu- 
nition service, from whom I found that a man 
who had roomed in my hall at college was 
stationed near by. But time had come for us 
to return to the station, and I could not see him. 

At seven o'clock we started our journey 
afresh, and at eleven left the train at Noisy to 
be condemned to wait upon the station plat- 
form until three o'clock this morning. Noisy 
made a fitting name for the place. Shivering 
with cold, with screeching, rattling trains con- 
stantly tearing by, we stretched out on a fif- 
teen-inch-wide slatted bench in an effort to 

sleep. A began to swear at me dreadfully 

because at periodic intervals I insisted upon 
sitting up and laughing. But rest was impos- 
sible, and soon we both chuckled so much 
that the giddiness in our chests quite over- 
topped the ache in the supperless cavity below. 

When at four o'clock the dusty, dimly 
lighted train rumbled up, we found every com- 
partment filled with snoring, very smelly poi- 
lus. Proceeding to the baggage car, however, 
we dug up our bed rolls, and triumphantly 
poking out a place for them among the hud- 



[37] 

died figures on the floor, turned in to sleep 
like logs for four hours. 

It was after seven when I awoke. A 



was about already, but most of our comrades 
in exile still lay en repos. Our car held one 
officer of dragoons, one Anamite colonial, nine 
"just poilus," the conductor, a great heap of 
rifles and field kits, and the two of us. 

Simple ceremonies began the day. After 
plunging our heads into a tub of water on a 
station platform, we breakfasted on four lemon 
drops and as many malted milk tablets, and 
chaffing and talking with the soldiers, merely 
sat waiting. 

The day dragged stupidly. Dinner did not 
materialize until late this afternoon, when we 
had been practically without food for twenty- 
six hours. Then the train stopped beside a 
railroad station buffet, and with a long line 
of grimy, sweaty poilus, I scrambled out and 
bought a chunk of bread, a bottle of wine, and 
four sausages. Later, it developed that the 
sausages had seen too much action, and we 
had to cast them overboard. The bread and 
wine that remained was no repast that a Fred 
Harvey railroad dining-hall might have issued, 
but we dined like princes. 



[38] 

And so up until now, with the prospect of 
a few hours' run still until we reach Cul- 
mont-Chalindrey, where we shall spend the 
night, continuing our trip to-morrow, when 
we hope to reach the section. We hope to 
reach it, that is, if by some strange chance it 
happens to be stationed at Rupt-sur-Moselle, 
the place to which our tickets read! 

Monday^ July 23 

After four changes of train to-day, we are 
riding comfortably in a first-class compart- 
ment now and on the last lap of our journey. 

Chalindrey last night proved to be an ante- 
chamber to Heaven. At an excellent hotel 
within the station, we found a huge dinner 
and soon were off to bed in a chamber that a 
king might well have slept in. The room held 
two exquisite walnut beds enclosed by tapes- 
try hangings, and, equipped with other fur- 
nishings quite as regal as the beds, was thrown 
into soft splendour by the glow of candles in 
heavy brass holders. 

Four o'clock this morning found us lum- 
bering along again in low mountains through 
a chateau district. Later, as the sun rose, a 
thin film of yellow mist hung in the valleys, 



[39] 

while above and back of them tumbled ranges 
of blue hills tinged a little transparently sil- 
ver by sun-bathed fog. All banked along the 
tracks, and through the fields, and even into 
the villages, lay a perfect rout of wild flowers. 

I could not feel depressed as we rode in the 
better coaches with only the company of offi- 
cers. They are more reserved than our friends 
the poilus. So, freed from the dull hurt of the 
soldiers forever going back to the trenches, 
both of us surged with unbridled happiness. 
We were moving to the Front! But the tri- 
umph was short. Thrown off* the train after 
an hour, our series of changes began. Every 
time I begin to feel complacent about riding 
first-class, we are thrown either into third, a 
baggage car, or on a station platform. 

Now, the dusk is settling, and though dog- 
tired, dirty, and unshaven, we are yet alive 
enough to feel a glow at having seen our first 
air battle. Just as we left jfipinal two Boche 
planes hummed over the town. At first, came 
the rattle of machine guns; afterward, crashes 
from the heavier mountain batteries. The air 
filled rapidly with white smoke puffs from 
exploding shells. But both machines dodged 
everything easily, and soon remained only the 



[40] 

smoke balls floating like bits of fleecy cotton 
against the darkening blue of the evening sky. 
It will be a wonderful relief to reach Rupt 
— if the section is there. As we are coming 
so close now, I am ashamed for having writ- 
ten at such length about our trip. Still, writ- 
ing made some sort of an occupation. We 
have been going for sixty-two hours. 

Rupt'Sur-Moselle 

Tuesday^ July 24 

T stood waiting for us on the station 



platform. If Chalindrey was an ante-chamber 
to Heaven, that man was assuredly Saint Peter 
at the Gate! My back is still sore from the 
slapping he gave it, and had I not been bodily 
restrained, I am sure I should have found 
French enthusiasm enough to kiss him. 

The cars stand only a few hundred yards 
from the railroad, and as we walked toward 
them through the dark, men began to flock 
about us. Their welcome would have sick- 
ened the Prodigal Son. And, indeed, so per- 
fect is it to be among them again, that I feel 
like a prodigal son for having been foolish 
enough to leave their company for even a 
month. 



[41 ] 

Lining the main street of a little factory 
town, the cars are surrounded by tenement 
houses, and very dirty, squalling babies sur- 
round the tenements. — But the youngsters 
are blessed enough, even though the}^ do ruffle 
one's soul by their eternal racket. — Most of 
us sleep on stretchers swung in the ambu- 
lances, and our meals are served on long tables 
set out on the sidewalk. It is all hardly the 
life of a country gentleman, but rather amus- 
ing at that. After a week of undressing, dress- 
ing, and bathing mostly in the main street of 
a fair-sized town, I shall certainly have worn 
some calluses on my sense of modesty. 
The days pass lazily and without event. 

Shorty P says that the only thing that 

happens is morning, noon, and night. We 
have fallen into a sort of lethargy in which 
nothing makes much difference. To-day, how- 
ever, orders came for us to move northward 
next Tuesday. Where, I do not know, but it 
is a matter of small moment. After all, from 
now on, everything is but a blind shake-up 
of dice, and the more or less lucky falling of 
them something merely to be grinned at 
cheerfully. But with the good, the bad, and 
the indifferent thrown all together, you 'd be 



[42] 

surprised at the real spontaneous happiness 
that we all feel through every hour. 

For two months now, in this weariness, I 
have been learning that the most part of War 
is not killing, but waiting. I do hope that my 
next letter will tell you that we have finally 
got into action. 



X 

Erize la Petite 
Sunday^ August 5, 1917 

This ends the eighth day of unceasing rain. 
Meals are things which one eats in the un- 
covered drip of the open from the shelter of 
a slicker and a pair of boots buried ankle- 
deep in mud. One's body is dry, but his food, 
a diluted concoction swapped together into a 
cross between bad hash and thick soup. Then, 
after a day of driving a skidding ambulance 
thirty miles an hour beneath sullen arches 
of unending poplars, one spends a pleasant 
evening by flinging handfuls of slime at his 
unsuspecting companions. You do not won- 
der that I feel a bit of an animal this week! 

With much water above, and more white 
mud beneath, we drove for three days. Rain 
fell in long, slanting sheets the entire time; 
and before we left the mountains, the cold, 
soaking mist of the clouds enveloped us. The 
trip was pretty bad. 

Leaving Rupt, our first night's halt was at 
Neufchateau, where I found a hotel in which 



[44] 

I managed to get a hot dinner and a bed with 
real sheets. Of course, I had struck it on a 
"no meat " day; but dinner consisted of some 
thirty-nine sorts of pickled fish and enough 
vegetable courses and clean plates and forks 
to have done for the entire section. So I made 
out well enough. The second night found us 
billeted in a hayloft that leaked. Still, the 
come-down in quarters was eased by a glori- 
ous evening spent in company with the Sam- 
mies who policed the town. 

I have now but two vivid impressions of 
the entire drive. One morning we halted for 
a few moments in a forlorn old village. Many 
pigs wallowed in the street, and under a shed a 
few sodden soldiers hunched. Rain drummed 
against the moss-covered roofs of the grey huts 
and lay in shining puddles along the road. 
Beside a great pump stood an old woman 
drawing water. Then we drove on, and later 
one of our French mechanics announced that 
the place was Domremy, The birthplace of 
Jeanne d'Arc was the hovel just behind the 
big pump! 

The other remembrance is a flash of a pic- 
ture which came two days later. We were 
driving through a rolling country when before 



[45] 

US, across a ridge sharply defined against the 
dull sky, marched a regiment of men. Part of 
the line broke into fronts of companies just as 
we passed. And we could see that the men 
wore broad-brimmed service hats and brown 
uniforms. American soldiers at War! . . . 

Our present cantonment is, I think, close 
to the end of creation. All things are either 
grey or white, and when a clinging, rainy twi- 
light shuts in, the formless heaps of the shat- 
tered little homes about make one think of 
ghosts keeping a dreary watch through the 
dusk of many passing souls. The windows 
in the few houses which have escaped bom- 
bardment bang and rattle most of the time 
from the thundering artillery off to the left, 
and occasionally, a long, long while apart, 
misplaced shells go chanting by far above us. 
But one has not passed for days. All we have 
is greasy, oozing black mud, a flat white road 
roaring with camion convoys, ragged ghost 
houses, and unpleasant dusk. 

But now, my tale of dreary things related, 
I shall spoil the whole illusion for you. I am 
living in a room which holds a huge bed and 

three chairs! T found this paradise for 

me on the day of our arrival, and though it 



[46] 

seem quite unromantic to you, I accepted it 
gladly. One soon learns here that the best way 
to camp out is not to do it until you have to. 
Really I am tremendously comfortable, and 
have had never an approach to illness. The 
days of eternal waiting grow pretty monoto- 
nous at times, but we are quite ready for the 
best that may be coming. 

The smoking tobacco is hopeless. Please, 
then, send me some pound cans of Prince 
Albert and Blue Boar, and some cartons of 
Hershey's chocolate. You had best make 
two or three different lots, and I shall surely 
receive some of them. You can never know 
how much tobacco and milk chocolate might 
mean in such a siege as this rainy spell has 
been. 



XI 

Brabant le Roi^ 
Thursday^ August 9, 19 17 

We came here two days ago finally to join 
our division before moving to — Verdun ! On 
the afternoon of our arrival, after making our- 
selves as beautiful as possible, we drew up in 
a stiff line, and were presented to the chief 
officers of the Forty-second Infantry. Monsieur 
le Colonel made a long speech in French, and 
one of the majors came forward to talk. But 
here the ceremonies nearly ended in a riot. 
From a small house behind us issued strains 
of the " Merry Widow Waltz " being played 
in a plaintive manner upon a piano which must 
just have been operated upon for gall-stones. 
So, gagging with swallowed shouts, we had 
finally to be freed to set about finding quarters. 
Now, the last night is here. We move up 
at five to-morrow morning. A tension has set- 
tled over all of us — an emotion too keen to 
be shaken off unfelt. Personally, my knees are 
pretty weak, and I wonder a little just whether 
I shall, through the beginning, be able to keep 



[48] 

control of my body. But inside, clear at the 
bottom, is some solemn spirit very closely 
akin, I think, to majesty. Surely one is not 
afraid of wounds or even death. What makes 
the nervousness is the fear merely of being 
hit. My whole body squirms at the thought. 

To-night the rain stopped, and the great 
dead black bowl of the sky was encircled by 
a lovely white rim. Behind a crumbled wall 
of houses, the sun, still fiery gold, etched the 
clouds into weird and startling contrasts. And 
across the eastern arch hung a livid rain- 
bow. Later, as I came to my room, I saw 
the evening star. 

Bevaux 
Saturday^ August il 

The drive up was monotonous rather than 
of any interest. Camion convoys thundering 
by my room all through the night preceding 
our move had left me sleepless, and next 
morning I was worn out. Seemingly, as we 
approached the lines, the only change came 
in the increasing barrenness of the country. 
The roads, slippery and crowded, were filled 
with pitifully worn poilus and grey-painted 
vehicles. 



[49] 

Arriving at about eleven at a place where 
the road lay along a hillside, we looked down, 
and quite as a surprise, saw Bevaux, the base 
hospital of the Verdun Sector. Soon the cars 
were parked, and we sat about, waiting for 
lunch. It was raining in flurries, with inter- 
mittent bursts of glorious sunshine that left 
the whole land below splashed with light and 
shade. Presently, we dined sumptuously upon 
a chunk of bread, two sardines each, and a 
bit of canned beef, and I crawled into the 
back of my machine for a nap. 

Late afternoon came before I heard the 
sharp " ta-ta-ta-tap " of a machine gun, and 
peered half drowsily through the rear window 
of the ambulance. Over the lines where a 
string of observation balloons hung, burst a 
cloud of smoke and flame. One of the big, 
sausage-like things crumpled together, and 
flutterincr from it came the white dot of a 
parachute. Prancing around a rim of clouds, 
a Boche airplane began to drop upon a sec- 
ond French balloon. Seven other machines 
hovered like sleek vultures in the air. The 
Boche missed, and the balloons hung motion- 
less. Then a French plane dropped from 
some place with a long flat rip from his mi- 



[so] 

trailleuse. His aim must have been certain, 
for as the Boche tried to whirl to safety in a 
series of flashing loops, his machine bucked 
crazilyfor a second and then streaked down- 
ward. 

Fifteen minutes later I helped set up the 
cook tent. Some of the cars were moving 
into place, and at a rough screech I looked 
up expecting much profanity over a set of 
stripped gears. It sounded like that. But out 
in our " front yard '' spurted up a column of 
dust and black smoke. Followed a sickening 
crash. One was hardly afraid of that first 
shell, but felt foolish. Soon two more high 
explosives roared in, and then we were left 
in quiet. . . . 

Oh, ho! my recounting of these things is 
the dead snake drawing its mate, I guess. 
Shells began to come again just a moment 
ago, and now are chanting by in an exceed- 
ingly obsequious manner to burst in a field 
behind our tents. 

Outside the tent T and some others 

are carrying on a great babbling and shout- 
ing. With green goggles over their eyes, 
they are lying about watching the airplanes 
dive for " sausages," for all the world as 



[si] 
though they were in box seats at a musical 
comedy. 

I think this is all. You had better not 
worry about me, because it will be sympathy 
lost. I am full of food and courage, and in- 
ordinately happy. After all, when there is 
only ordinary fighting, with the noise and air- 
planes and excitement, the whole thing is 
exactly like a jolly state fair. So be happy! 



XII 

Bevaux 
Monday^ August 13, 191 7 

The last twenty-four hours have been terri- 
ble. Beginning just at evening Sunday, shells 
roared over our heads to burst in a village 
a little behind the camp. While we were eat- 
ing supper a small railroad was struck and a 
great gap torn in a passing wagon train. 

At dusk, T drove eight of us to the 

front to learn the roads to our postes. We rode 
first beneath great trees whose trunks and 
leaves were powdered white with dust; and 
on, beside long lines of trucks, wagons, cais- 
sons, marching infantry, until the way lay 
through the ragged remains of a village; then 
we broke up over a sharp ridge into the heart 
of the French batteries. It was horrible. 
Above the guns, the air screamed and hissed 
with awful sounds, the earth twitching and 
quaking — each shell flying out with a pecul- 
iar pitch of its own — the " 75's " flinging up 
stabbing wails to ricochet with the frightfully 
hiccoughing wet shrieks of ^"15 5's" away from 




WHEN THEY HAD c;ONE 



[S3] 

the dry, hot roar and crashing rumble of great 
siege things. Up and down the ridge hung 
a sullen crimson glare writhing with flame 
tongues, and sometimes twenty feet away 
from the ambulance the fire crashed. I can- 
not tell that sensation. 

Stopping at Batterie Hopital we asked the 
way to Saint-Fine. A little removed from 
the poste lay the shattered ruin of a machine 
gun, the earth about it torn open and littered 
with cartridges and a few rocks dyed with 
dark red blotches. I had only a glimpse, but 
it was long enough to let a flash of horror 
into my heart. 

Driving on from the poste we dropped off 
the ridge into the dead land out between the 
artillery and trenches. Dull quiet reigned 
here: the gun shock numbed by distance, the 
land silent from desertion. There was no 
grass. Where trees had been lay a few jag- 
ged, bitten -off stumps, level with the earth. 
Every square yard of land had been lifted 
and torn by some shell. Death staggered over 
the hills in lines of crosses. Life glowed only 
in a few red poppies oozing out of the raw 
earth scars. I think the earth, soaked to ex- 
cess with the blood of men, had from it given 



C 54 ] 

body to these flowers. . . . Occasionally a shell 
whiffed into and out of the silence. A dead 
horse lay beside the road, his legs stuck out 
and awry, one missing. Here the crosses 
stuck up crazily, most of them from the rims 
of shell-holes filled with rotten water. Over 
the road — a thing made up of loose rock each 
day and ripped to pieces each night — the am- 
bulance lurched along until I had diflSculty in 
holding my seat. After a while we saw, through 
a notch in a ridge, a land blue and soft, sprin- 
kled above it a white powder of stars. But 
the Germans held that gap, and we slid along 
the edge of a bare hillside that they were 
shelling. Three high explosives fell far ahead; 
one, two hundred feet to our left. And so into 
a deep gully and the poste of La Source. 

We came back through the dark over roads 
that squirmed with the beginning night traffic 
— traffic without eyes, feeling. On one shelled 
stretch a tire went flat, but we drove on and 
fixed it under the glare of a heavy battery. 

Back at the base, the bombardment had 
swerved to the left and demolished a small 
ammunition depot a bit away, leaving the 
evening jfilled with the yellow of flames and 
the crash and hiss of French shells exploding 



\:s5:\ 

within the heat. As we stood before our tents 
some fragments of steel even fell about us. 
Our men said the first shell to strike the depot 
had killed twelve soldiers; and the night con- 
voys were still passing steadily within twenty 
yards of the bursting shells. 

Men on stretchers began to come in as we 
arrived. One huddled shape had the top of 
his head gone; — his brains where they should 
not have been. I do not know why they had 
brought him here. Some were mangled sick- 
eningly. A few very still — dead. 

The shelling went on into the night, but I 
rested without waking for eight hours. This 
morning the bombardment continued. 

At half-past nine, Lieutenant M asked 

me to drive him to the town of Haudremont 
which had been shelled yesterday with all 
manner of queer results. One sight was that 
of a Reinault five-ton camion thrown bodily 
upon the roof of a house. On another street, 
an eight-inch shell had come through two 
stone buildings and lay shining in the road, 
unexploded. 

Picking up our daily supplies and a surgeon 
who was to return with us, we left Lieuten- 
ant M at Bevaux and drove on to M.F. 4, 



[56] 

the poste of the surgeon. The road lay in 
hills the entire way, over country much 
rougher even than that of last night. And to- 
ward the end we ran headlong into more 
shelling. 

At the bottom of a clay precipice and nearly 
two hundred feet below the road, lay the lit- 
tle hospital. Sprawling down into it stretched 
a narrow, slippery path, at the foot of which 
roared a battery of " iSS's." Nothing in the 
world can describe adequately the noise of a 
heavy battery. The air sounded as a coffee 

strainer looks. While W watched the car, 

I helped a poilu carry some supplies down to 
the poste; and then and there I decided that 
the incoming shells were not really meant for 
the road. A high explosive dropped almost 
on top of the French battery, and scarcely 
sixty yards from me. 

After I returned to the car, W and I 

lunched off a can of beef, and sat smoking in 
a cold drizzle as we waited for our first bless^ 
to be brought up. Presently he came, riding 
pick-a-back on a poilu. That wounded soldier 
had a sprained ankle! I thought a good many 
things about the high explosive down in the 
gully, and W swore long and fluently. 



[57] 
Next poste in, however, we got a poor beg- 
gar with part of his face gone and the rest of 
it leaking in little drips through the bandages. 
This afternoon came a deluge that threat- 
ened the well-being of the tent, which leaked 
badly. But I am so very happy! Good-night 
now. 

Tuesday afternoon 
It has occurred to me that I had better be 
explicit for a day. You know nothing of an 
ambulance section. 

We have twenty ambulances, a touring-car, 
and a camionette. (A camion is a truck.) Two 
men are assigned to each car, and the section 
is commanded by two American chiefs and a 
lieutenant from the French Army. Other than 
these men are the French mechanics and 
cooks. Oh, — I almost forgot to mention it, — 
and our chief cook, Campillo, was foreman of 
a garage in Algeria before he joined us! 

As we take up regular work a detail of cars 
will go daily to Citerne, the base poste de 
secours, and wait there for calls to come from 
the postes farther to the front. Going out on 
call, one carries one's wounded from the first 
dressing-stations to Bevaux, and returns then 



[58] 
to Citerne. Sometimes on active nights, how- 
ever, cars are stationed directly at the busier 
postes in addition to those at Citerne. French 
stretcher-bearers carry the blesses from the 
trenches to the postes and also load and un- 
load our cars. 

Last Sunday I was transferred from driver 
of number 15 to number 4, and so have fallen 

into comradeship with W , one of the finest 

fellows in the section. T , M , W , 

and I have been together constantly since the 
first days in Paris, and I am indeed fortunate 
to have been paired off with W . 

To-day has been quiet — not a shell within 
hearing. I have not been out, and the hours 
have passed just with being lazy, working a 
little on my machine, and writing. This morn- 
ing brought more rain, and Campillo gave us 
our bread and coffee in bed. The Horrors of 
War! 

Friday^ August 17 
Going on at five o'clock Wednesday after- 
noon, I completed my first twenty-four-hour 
tour of Front duty last night. The earlier part 
of Wednesday evening, as we waited at Citerne, 
left us all gloomy, for a heavy rain fell, and 



[59 3 

the night grew very cold. We could have no 
light, and overcrowded abris deprived us of 
even the comfort of a sandbag-covered hole 
burrowed into the earth. Two of the cars went 
out on call, the remainingfour men of us liven- 
ing our spirits with a couple of quarts of cham- 
pagne, a can of the ever-present beef, some 
hard biscuit, and a bit of very gritty chocolate 
which we improved by roasting over a shel- 
tered candle flame. Soon after, I turned in on 
the scant comfort of a twelve-inch-wide am- 
bulance seat to sleep soundly until half-past 

two when W rooted me out with a call for 

Carriere Sud. Carriere Sud is unqualifiedly 
the worst poste in France. 

A slight drizzle of rain still clung in the 
air, cloaking every ray of starlight. Out on the 
main road five-ton camions came booming: out 
of the dark, skidding half sideways, hidden in 
the mist until they were upon us. And from 
the heart of the night came ever the mournful 
rattle and vague bulk of slow-moving wagons. 
At half-past two, the drivers of wagons are 
always asleep and on the wrong side of the 
road. I shall wake up in the night screaming 
"Adroite!" until I die. 

So we crawled along, skidding, turning, 



[6o] 

W sometimes walking ahead to feel out 

the road, until a fork in the road loomed out 
where neither of us knew our direction. All 
our shouts to two hunched-up figures on 
a wagon brought back only silence which 
blended hopelessly into the damp blackness 
about us. I do not know what shot through my 
heart — fear or despair; but a moment passed 
which might have been filled with either. So it 

was strange to hear W laugh and say, ^' Oh, 

hell, Sparkle, ^ Turn to the Right.'" Wrong 
roads have a nasty habit of dropping out at 
their end in sight of the Boche trenches. But 
I laughed, too, and we went grinding along. 
After a long time of darkness and jolting, 

we found Captain N and the chief with 

their car ditched in the mud. Anxious to go on 

and find S and C , who had been gone 

six hours without report, the chief climbed 

into our car, leaving Captain N seated 

on the running-board of the ditched machine, 
calmly smoking a cigarette as he scratched in 
the mud with a walking-stick. In the face of 
danger and difficulty, before hardship and the 
greatest discomforts, I have never known a 
calmer, more spirited commander of men than 
Captain N . The chief drove with W 



[6i ] 

on the seat beside him as I lay forward on the 
fender in an effort to see the road. Such a time 
falls upon one's mind like a narcotic, and I 
thought and moved only to squeeze in tight to 
the hood away from a few skidding camions. 
Presently came the relief of seeing the dim 
shape of an ambulance with both front wheels 

smashed crazily in a shell-hole. W and I 

drove on alone. 

We crawled out on the desert. Few Boche 
shells fell in, and our own guns seemed half 
asleep. All that I remember is an occasional 
glimpse of the sad bare land shown red by the 
sudden gun flashes; then a wall of darkness 
made impenetrable by the red, dancing spots 
left in my eyes from the quick glare. Once we 
struck something soft lying across the road. 
Probably some poor devil beyond reach of 
shell-fire or the wheels of careless automo- 
biles. . . . Then Carriere Sud. 

W went down the narrow cut leading 

from the road to the poste while I stayed with 
the car. Two high-wheeled carts, barely visi- 
ble, stood in the cut, and something lay beside 
me on the ground. I stepped from the machine. 
. . . There, shattered, torn, still under the fire 
of guns, but quiet and calm, lay the straight 



[6z] 

figures of the night's dead. I had never seen 
soldiers dead in bulk — before had been only 
the few covered forms on stretchers. Yet the 
sight held no horror. Perhaps it gave rise to 
some spirit of glory. But it was sad — oh, so 
terribly, unutterably sad. 

After the tension and uncertainty of the long 
drive, something grew quiet in me, and I 
wanted to cry. 

The loading of the two carts went on silently. 
Little tenderness the process embraced, yet 
the three men who lifted each body were not 
rough. After all, they were only comrades 
together. 

White-faced and a little shaky from a shell 
which had struck in a mud bank beside him, 

W returned soon with our ten assis 

(slightly wounded men, able to sit up). And 
just as the first dawn silvered out we plunged 
again into the last rush of inbound traffic. 

At eight o'clock the little carts had come 
to the burying-field across the road from Ci- 
terne, and I went over to the open ditch 
graves. Not a pleasant sight there as the fig- 
ures lay in their crimson-blotched, muddy 
uniforms, white-faced in the daylight. Yet 
gracing the pitiful scene hovered the great still- 



ness that death makes alike for the hideous 
and the beautiful — the one absolute thing 
out of all the weary fretfulness of fighting. 
Removing my helmet, I remained a few mo- 
ments, spoke a little prayer, saluted, and came 
away. . . . 

Last night the Boches rolled through our 
two first trench lines in the sector before Car- 
riere Sud with frightful slaughter. Just before 
dawn, swept out the French back-current that 
regained everything — and more slaughter. 
Twelve of our cars worked steadily, but I had 
to keep in bed, for I am on reserve to-night. 

Good-night, dear you. 

Sunday afternoon 
I did not get out Friday night after all. 
Dressed and booted, the reserve drivers slept 
on mud-caked, bloody stretchers spread on 
the office floor and were not called until a great 
press came Saturday afternoon. 

W and I went on then and happened 

to draw exceedingly long runs which kept us 
moving without rest and under a good deal of 
fire for seventeen hours. Even so we made 
only four trips, but had the comfort of carry- 
ing forty-four wounded in these. The night 



[64] 

glowed with splendid stars, and driving was 
quite easy. Shelling with high explosives 
almost ceased toward evening, but gas bomb- 
ing followed at once, and toward morning I 
became miserable from a few whiffs of mus- 
tard gas which had beat my mask to my nose. 

Mustard gas is so ridiculous. The stuff is 
odourless and prone to catch one unawares. 
We struck the first puddle just below Fort 
Vaux. My first consciousness of trouble came 
from a queer irritation in my nose, and smart- 
ing tears flowing down my cheeks. Because 
the air seemed perfectly sweet, however, I 

said nothing until W turned toward me 

weeping as though he had lost his last friend. 
After that, with terrible shrieks and cursing 
from the poor wounded beggars, we did some 
accelerating. 

We struck several other gas curtains before 
morning, but suffered no other ill effect than 
might have been caused by a cold in the head. 
What was worse than the gas came when, 

after my last trip, W called to me. Some 

fellow had gone insane with agony, torn off 
his bandages, and bled to death in the ambu- 
lance. So the night ended with our having to 
mop out the floor with a gunnysack. . . . But 




c\ -^ 



> g 



[6s] 

three hours later, bathed in the bright sun- 
shine of a Sunday morning, I slid down the 
long hill before the city of Verdun, and found 
a great batch of letters from you. 

Do not let worry for me eat too deeply into 
your hearts. I am living in it all, you know, 
and yet never a day passes that I do not feel 
the thrill of knowing that I shall come home to 
'vyou. What is about us here, you must meet 
in as straightforward a way as do we. Never 
for a single instant let fear and doubt grow 
into a monster. For it is to you in a light of 
perfect beauty to whom we cling in our hearts 
when we have shut them to everything else 
in the world. 



XIII 

Bevaux 
Friday^ August 24, 191 7 

Uncertainty and fright have so dug my 
conscience this week that I have spent the 
entire morning writing letters. Those who 
receive them and learn my motive for writ- 
ing may laugh or be insulted as they like, but 
if they will go through the emotions that 
caused me to write, they should be of a mind 
to think twice over the pages I have sent 
them. 

Several da3^s of terrific artillery fire came 
to a climax last Sunday night when our guns 
put out two million rounds in seven hours as 
a last blow toward laying clear the way for 
an infantry attack at dawn Monday. 

A mist from recent rain clung in the air 
Sunday evening, and falling with summer 
slowness, the twilight hung like a dull grey 
shroud, leaving the stark devastation all about 
sadder than ever. The announcement of an 
attack always means a sense of heavy fore- 
boding in the hearts of men. So as the chief 



[ 67 ] 

went from tent to tent detailing cars for Mon- 
day's action, the usually gay groups there fell 
silent. The next two hours, as I sat alone, were 
not lovely. 

But when at four o'clock Monday morning, 
twenty of us stood shivering and drowsy about 
a bucket of black coffee, the world grew bright 
again. Slipping silently away down the empty 
road the ten cars on duty parked in soon at 
Citerne, where we sat about waiting. As we 
lived in its reality the morning of an attack 
was no different from all other mornings of 
fighting. By six o'clock word came that in 
one hard rush lasting only an hour the French 
had taken every one of their objectives. But 
then the little dead-carts came trundling up 
in squads, and we, too, began our reaping of 
the sad half of Front victory. 

After I began to drive, the remembrance 
of that first day and night of attack remains 
as but a fever and blur. Two or three pictures 
of unmentionable things in the burying-field 
come back, and the infinitely more cheerful 
sight of squad after squad of Boches march- 
ing along, joyously enough, to prison camp. 
Despite the fact that they had been plucked 
from the Crown Prince's army, these fellows 



[68] 

made a sorry enough lot — most of them were 
boys and old men. As a squad passed, one of 
our men reached out and lifted the helmet off a 
corporal. Beneath a shining bald spot on the 
bared head of the man clung only a thin fringe 
of white hair. 

Back and forth all day and night we trun- 
dled over roads torn and littered indescriba- 
bly. During Monday the shelling was slight, 
as the Boches were busy enough with our 
trenches without minding the roads. Yet I 
was glad enough to be able to snatch a couple 
of hours' sleep and a meal in camp sometime 
Monday night. 

By some confusion, W had got on 

M 's car Monday afternoon, and as he was 

still out, I took Tuesday's duty with F 

as my aide. That day was bad enough. The 
morning passed quietly as I hauled Boches, 
but in the afternoon bombardments by both 
sides began again. All the dead had not been 
buried, and the roads everywhere contin- 
ued in chaos. The way to Carriere Sud was 
particularly bad. Hardly enough of it remained 
to pick up in a basket, and beside it, dead long 
enough to be unpleasant, stretched lines of 
horses and halves and quarters and bits of 



[69] 

horses that swarmed with rats. Farther front 
legs and arms — sometimes a whole trunk — 
lay loose. 

By late evening, however, a new long line 
of ditches across fromCiterne had been filled, 
and many shell-pits repaired along the most 
important routes. One cut that had been made 
below Fort Douaumont by a 42-centimetre 
held four wagons and six dead horses beneath 
its covering of stone. 

Tuesday evening at about eight F and I 

went up for night assignment at Carriere Sud. 
Despite the improvement of the roads, the 
growing dusk did not hide many, many pits 
with edges blackened and smudged from fresh 
powder smoke. Some shells fell about us, too, 
and after I had seen the body of an already 
too long dead horse ripped clean open by a 
whirring chunk of eclat, it was a relief to turn 
out for our poste. 

Carriere Sud has been burrowed into the 
face of an old stone quarry. Two hundred yards 
before it lie the French trenches, and perhaps 
sixty yards across from them, the German. Be- 
hind, above, and all about the poste are never- 
silent batteries of " 7S's." Undoubtedly, many 
Boche shells are directed purposely at the little 



[7o] 

hospital; but were they not, the batteries about 
would draw fire enough that not five minutes 
of any day or night could pass without bring- 
ing in the crash of a high explosive and its 
terrible accompanying shower of steel and 
jagged splinters of rock. 

One reaches the dugout by turning left 
from the main road into a short cut blasted 
through rock walls. Going in here, as we did, 
in the last light of a summer evening, the first 
thing which greets one's senses is the over- 
powering, unmanning stench of dead human 
flesh. The corpses, sprinkled lightly with quick- 
lime, are in a low shed without walls, where 
they lie in layers like herring in a box waiting 
for the grim little carts to drag them back over 
their last trip to the still grimmer burying- 
fields. 

Chaffing and talking with a few brancardiers 
we stood for a few minutes in the open. A high 
explosive fell squarely on top of the poste. 
Then another, and our helmets tinkled with the 
blows of some bits of rock. As a third shell 
screeched in and ripped open, I felt some queer 
presentiment of fear, and F and I stum- 
bled into a dimly lighted room. Scarcely were 
we seated on a crazy bench when a shell burst 



[71] 
before the door of the abri exactly where we 
had stood. Inside, the concussion jarred out 
the two candles, and we were left stunned in 
appalling darkness. 

Some brancardier fumbling about set up a 
great cursing, but found a match finally, and 
the candles glowed again. In one corner of the 
narrow, low room lay a moaning figure whose 
head was enveloped in bloody rags. Sprawled 
out in a battered mahogany chair upholstered 
with red velvet — God knows how it had got 
there — a fat brancardier of middle age was 
recounting tales of his many affaires de coeur. 
Other men crouched about, and with them we 
left our bench and seated ourselves on the 
floor. 

Refilled many times from a cask in the cor- 
ner, a canteen of pinard passed frequently 
enough to enliven all of our spirits somewhat. 
Rough jests ran in the room, blending queerly 
with the incessant moans of the man on the 
stretcher. Our conversation turning then to 
the subject of "totos" I scratched about and 
displayed my largest specimen. . . . So a couple 
of hours whiled away in half-drunken mer- 
riment, until, drowsy, F and I left the 

company to go to the sleeping-room. The 



[ 72 ] 

bombardment had continued with such vio- 
lence that carrying any wounded before morn- 
ing would be impossible. 

In the other abri, racks along the walls 
held stretchers upon which lay wounded men 
and sleeping soldiers. Steaming with mois- 
ture, the heavy air hung dankly above puddles 
of water on the floor. Outside, the shells rum- 
bled in and burst with dull roars. But one 
felt very safe down there. 

I glanced a moment into the operating- 
room, sizzling with white light, where a man 
mumbled as he went under ether, then found 
a vacant stretcher and lay down. Over me 
in two or three places fell a little drip of 
water. Presently, some sort of sleep came, 
but as I fell drowsy the thick voices, the grey 
figures moving about, the close air, the rum- 
ble of the shells all churned into such a ridic- 
ulous mess in my mind. Finally, I remem- 
ber the rip-rip of the bone-saw which the 
surgeon was using on his leg case. So I slept 
only fitfully until the racket which a badly 
wounded man was making awakened me 
sometime in the night. His legs and head 
were shot up, and a pad bandaged across his 
mouth, and though the poor devil must have 



[73] 

been bellowing with pain, only such a funny, 
flat sound came out. One thinks of queer 
things in the night like that. I grinned as I 

remembered the time Uncle W had gone 

out and tied a towel about the mouth of a 
bawling cow. 

Then, somehow, sleep came back. War, 
the attack, horror, fear, weariness, merged 
into blackness and I lay breathing evenly and 
quietly. 

At five o'clock we took five couches and 
started in. Where for half a mile in open 
view of the Boche trenches the road was shot 
completely to pieces, I tried to go fast, for 
full daylight had come, and I was horribly 
afraid. But the beggars in back all roared so 
that I could find no heart to make their agony 
greater. So we plugged along in "first." 

Wednesday brought another day of Front 
work, and Thursday an easy run of rear evac- 
uation. I spent Friday in camp and returned 
yesterday to duty to Citerne. Last night I 
spent at La Source in an abri much the same 
as Carriere Sud — but worse. All night a 
brancardier half dead with tuberculosis lay 
on a stretcher beneath me snoring and snort- 
ing like a steamboat whistle. The air was 



[74] 
bad — eight of us lay cooped together in an 
unventilated room ten feet square — and most 
of the soldiers had been eating garlic and 
drinking rum. But I slept well enough. 

Listening to the last stand of the attack 
which went on this morning, I lay on my 
stretcher until we were relieved about eight, 
and driving into camp, we found that the 
Boches had fallen back again — more than a 
kilometre along an eighteen-kilometre front. 
The French also had taken an important town. 
And so snuggling happily down between my 
blankets, I read a great fresh batch of mail 
until I fell asleep. 



XIV 

Bevaux 
Friday^ August 31, 191 7 

I HARDLY know why we should have been 
spared bombing raids during the first nights 
of our stay here. But I cannot express my 
thankfulness when I say that we were spared 
for even a few nights. All of us have learned 
this week that air raids are the most uncom- 
fortable things in War. 

Tuesday night brought the first wave of 

excitement. About nine o'clock T and 

I were lying before the tents when the first 
low hum of machines welled up from the 
direction of the trenches. Granted that the 
planes were Boche, however, there seemed 
no cause for terror — then. Presently the 
whirring passed over us to the left and be- 
came dull. Fainter and fainter the sounds 
fell until we had supposed them gone. But 
out of the stillness suddenly burst open three 
great sheets of flame over a road far to the 
rear. Followed a quaking shock and roar, 
and immediately three more columns of red 



[76] 

fire. Harsh in the night came the staccato 
hiccoughs of two or three machine guns. 
Then the tapering silver blades of half a 
dozen searchlights swept with long white 
cuts across the darkness. Another series of 
explosions roared out farther away than the 
first, but scarcely before its echoes quieted, 
we realized that two new machines were 

coming up. T spit out a cigarette stub 

with vehemence. Cringing flat on the ground 
we stared up at the lac}^ shadow of a huge 
plane sweeping scarcely a hundred yards 
above the tents. By some freak of luck the 
ray of one of the searchlights fell full on it, and 
for just a second the white wings glowed into 
strong incandescence. Five shells screeched 
up from the ground and burst with crackling 
explosions. The machine, untouched, swerved 
easily away into the pool of black outside the 
glare, and in just a second the field behind 
the tents lifted up and out in heavy columns 
of smoke shot with flame. That was enough. 
Streaking it for the nearest abri, we stumbled 
down a precipitous flight of steps, and with 
the others of the section, spent an uncom- 
fortable three hours amidst pitch blackness 
seated in a mud puddle. 



[77] 

Every other night in the week has seen the 
same performance. Tuesday evening, in addi- 
tion, brought a brief shelling of the camp, but 
fortunately nothing was struck. 

There now, it is all out, and not very en- 
thusiastically at that, I am afraid. It is grey 
and raining and cold to-day as though all the 
dreary ghosts of the War were brushing their 
tears and fingers over everything. My hands 
are blue and stiff, and a trolloping, cutting 
wind comes billowing in through the tents 
barring all chance of comfort, unless one re- 
mains in bed. Enthusiasm does not bubble 
up readily out of such surroundings — even 
for coming home. Coming home is only a 
fairylike sort of dream pitifully far removed 
from our real life. The only true things are sick 
sounding guns and bloody men and rain and 
mud — and lice. I have plenty of warm cloth- 
ing. But somehow your hands are always 
cold, and it takes more than boots and over- 
coats to keep your soul warm. 

Yet something is in our minds that never 
lived there before. It is an indefinable sort of 
thing, — most of the time none of us are con- 
scious of its presence, — but if you 'd take any 
one of us apart, you'd find us happy. 



[78] 

Front duty again to-morrow. Perhaps I 
shall finish writing then. 

Sunday morning 
Things have been ever and ever so quiet 
at the Front this week. It is reaction from the 
attack, I suppose. Tuesday — the only other 
day save yesterday that I was on duty — we 
sat in the warm sun at Citerne and carried 
exactly eight wounded in an entire day and 
night. 

The days in camp (as the beginning of this 
letter will show!) did not gleam with cheer. 
Most of the time it rained, and all of the tents 
leak. Yet even the rainy days are not hope- 
lessly bad. About eight o'clock some one 
always cocks an eye out and starts an argu- 
ment as to whose turn it is to bring breakfast 
to the tent. After that the hours somehow 
pass by unaided. The more one sleeps, the 
more of his troubles he forgets. And so, by 
and by, comes the evening bombardment of 
the railroad or the big barracks close beside 
us. Then the airplanes, and after our cus- 
tomary sarcastic remarks about the Crown 
Prince's army, we are off to the abris. 

I shall not be fit for any useful occupation 



[79] 

when I come out But really we have all had 
a pretty good time in becoming spoiled. Al- 
though we revile any word that hints War, 
fighting is not so very bad. One learns some 
things here. It is good to find that you have 
enough sense of humour to call "Fore!" 
when you hear a thousand pounds of hot iron 
come screaming your way. And did you ever 
stop to think that the blanched, blood-stained, 
muddy figures lying in the drip of a grey au- 
tumn rain are no more dead than the trees 
whose blown-down leaves swirl about them? 
We found little work on duty yesterday. I 
put on all the warm things I could get, in- 
cluding several blankets that crawled per- 
ceptibly, and slept for twelve hours. Even so, 
however, I managed nearly to touch one dis- 
aster. Stopping at Citerne, a colonel asked for 
a guide to Carriere Sud. My turn for call had 
come, and seating myself on the running- 
board of the colonel's roadster, we had started 

when Lieutenant V brought from the 

abri a road map which made a guide unne- 
cessary. Half an hour later the machine, pretty 
badly torn up, returned, its driver wounded 
in two places, and the colonel white and limp, 
with a chunk of eclat in his left lung. W 



[8o] 

and I drove them on to Bevaux immediately. 
And there, as we unloaded, happened the 
most beautiful thing I have ever seen among 
soldiers. As the brancardiers lifted the colo- 
nel's stretcher from the ambulance, his eyes 
fluttered open, and recognizing me he saluted 
slowly, whispering, " Merci, monsieur." He 
died early this morning. 

Such queer things happen at the Front. 
About one o'clock this morning a call came 
from some little abri that we had never heard 
of; so picking up a couple of brancardiers 

who professed to know the place, W and 

I went out. Well, we drove for two mortal 
hours under more or less fire, stopping at 
every hole in the ground we could see, and 
finally struck the place. Upon which a drowsy 
poilu thrust his head above a heap of sand- 
bags, and after cursing us soundly for having 
awakened him, mumbled that the wounded 
had been sent back an hour ago in a wagon. 
Things like that ought to make you angry, 
but it's such a relief to get back to Citerne 
again that just a long laugh comes instead. 

The section, very unexpectedly, has been 
placed en repos for fifteen days beginning with 
to-day. We should have been sent to the rear 



[8i] 

where things would have been quiet. But the 
orders failed to come, and we shall rest as 
best we can here. One has excellent things 
to eat en repos. 

Indeed, all the mail has been coming — 
five, ten, even twelve letters a week. You 
don't know how those letters get clung to 
more and more each week. 



XV 

Laheycourt 
Wednesday^ Septe?nber 5, 191 7 

Only a barn. We live in a hayloft now, w^ith 
a great pile of straw in one corner, a line of 
cots in the other end, and yellow, hot pokings 
of sunlight flowing with blue tobacco smoke 
thrusting through. 

Can't you guess that we did move to the 
rear after all, and that this old hayloft is the 
most wonderful palace in the world ? . . . No, 
I don't suppose you will be able to guess. As 
I write I am dangling my legs out of a window 
and glancing occasionally at a white road that 
faces west against the last pale sunset yellow 
and a black toppled cathedral spire. By and 
by I shall walk along the road to the village. 
And when I return, the way will be gleaming 
under the red flush of the old moon a little 
like alabaster in dimmed sunlight. ... It is 
loveliest in the night. The dust clings only 
silver and faint then, and the tiredness of day- 
light drops away like a fairy-tale witch before 
a magic prince. 



[83] 

In the village a band plays every evening in 
a long shed of rough board, and before the music 
we sit in the corner cafe — " Cafe de la Paix," 
if you Parisians will know the name of which 
it is impertinent enough to boast! There as 
we drink our coffee, glimpses of people seated 
on their doorsteps creep through the windows. 
And the children are very clean and fresh, 
wandering around like primly dressed little 
old men and women. . . . The first evening 
here I spied two white-headed mites solemnly 
holding hands as they came into the boulan- 
gerie for a loaf of bread. Neither baby so 
much as gasped as I picked each up in my 
arms. One of them kissed me. 

I shall write no more now. It is better to go 
back and sniff the new hay in the loft while I 
watch a fat girl milk a peaceful old cow. 
There is only one way to find peace. This is 
to go to war after it. 

Sunday 

I am afraid I reckoned my happiness too 
quickly. I cannot tell you of the terrible reac- 
tion which has come in these days of quiet 
after our fight. I cannot tell you, because I do 
not know myself why it has come or toward 
what it is tending. 



[84] 

Physically, I am well enough, but I am un- 
able to sleep, and I want nothing to eat Most 
of the trouble is probably because my nerves 
are smashed to bits, and in my mind, all the 
thoughts and beliefs I have ever had are sud- 
denly being cast out and replaced by new. 
You may not help me now in this pain which 
I must suffer as some new sort of self comes 
to me, but neither must you worry. I shall be 
steady in a few days, and far bigger, I think, 
than I have ever been before. 



XVI 

Laheycourt 
Saturday^ September 15, 191 7 

I THINK my trouble of last week has faded out 
now. Much worry and unrest remains; but 
the most awful problem has become resolved 
with vivid clearness — that of reenlisting. 
Think of these things: — 

1. A headless body; a body ending at the 
waist in rotting, dry red and two splintered 
thigh bones; a black, mummy-like thing lain 
for two weeks in the sun unburied. 

2. Driving an automobile over a broken 
road through black darkness. Two lines of 
creeping traffic, plodding, patient, breaking 
only when torn open by a bursting shell ; halt- 
ing only while a mass of shattered wagons, 
automobiles, and screaming horses and men 
is shoved from the road. Red, blinding flashes 
from guns; noise. The ghastly, staggering 
green paths of star-shells. The shrieking crash 
of shells. 

3. The queer sensation of dropping sud- 
denly into a pool of gas in a valley bottom. 



[86] 

4. The terrible helplessness of standing in 
the uncovered night beneath a shadowy air- 
plane that is dropping bombs. 

5. Being spattered with mud, rock, bits 
of hot iron from a shell perhaps eighty feet 
distant. 

Those are the elements of the Front, and 
each has its emotions that catlike acid through 
the covering of the accepted things of ordi- 
nary life to a vaster depth beneath. I cannot 
explain why a line of dead soldiers lying in 
the pale grey of early dawn brings out a truth. 
I do not know how the other elements of War 
react to make a man from a selfish, narrow 
child. . . . But I have lived in them and grown. 
I have learned to love life as the dearest gift 
we have. I have learned to be unafraid of 
death. In them I have seen a conception of a 
God. 

Now, only one course opens before me. 
The good that I have found in this thing has 
left me terribly indebted. Somehow, it seems 
that War has touched me only to give. Of 
me never one little price has been exacted 
— I do not know how God feels about a bal- 
ance like that, because He is pretty generous. 
But some people have got to fight, and if those 



[87] 
will not do it to whom the very fight has given 
the power, what of the others? I think I must 
stay until the end. 

Until that time, everything lies before God. 
He has given me a conception of manhood. 
And I have fumbled up from some place the 
decision to live in that conception. If, then, 
God feels that I can be of any use in this life 
when the fighting has stopped — He will let 
me stay. 

After Peace — oh, there is so much that I 
am hungry for. Just down beneath the great 
surface what things of wonder are waiting 
for some one with a keener sight than another 
to find and love, to breathe his own life into 
them that they may live ! I have had such eyes 
these days. 

And yet — all of that has gone black for a 
minute now. Things are still so blurred and 
uncertain in their reality. I am so pitifully 
young. In the coming days of quiet while I 
am at home after this term of enlistment you 
must help me to mix good judgment with my 
dreams. For I owe not only to the War; so 
much is your share of the little bit I have to 
give. 

The sunshiny days of external life this week 



[88] 

have been as beautiful as my mind has been 
clouded and turbulent. Long days of luxuri- 
ant idling, of walking, seeing things, of breath- 
ing in and loving things. Monday we return 
to the Front; but this time to a sector, it is 
said, which is almost ridiculously quiet. You 
need have little worry, for every hour is 
brighter now than the one passed. 



XVII 

Sommedieue 
Thursday^ September 20, 191 7 

Propped up before me are six unopened let- 
ters which I shall not read until after supper. 
Queer little sentiments creep into us. One can 
get almost as much pleasure from waiting two 
hours and guessing the contents of a pack of 
mail as from reading it. Before the letters are 
opened comes the beautiful dream of you, what 
you will say, — oh, everything. And I dare be 
very extravagant in my imaginings then, fori 
know that during a whole hour afterwards I 
shall read your very words. Of course, after 
the letters are all read — it is beautiful then, 
too, but — you seem so pitifully far away for 
a while. 

The new sector is delightful — not a great 
distance from Verdun, but plentifully far re- 
moved from the dearly detested old Bevaux. 
The land stretches out in long hills heavily 
wooded with slim old green-headed giants of 
trees that stand in hundred-foot shafts whis- 
pering strange little broken songs into the 



C90] 

golden autumn mist. There is none of the gall- 
ing, raking fire of small guns. The only cannon 
are great, heavy things whose tongues burn 
out of the cool green only a few times in a 
whole day. The roads are shelled but seldom, 
and wounded men are few. 

Billeted in a huge old residence near the 
edge of the village, we are more supremely 
comfortable than at anytime since Paris days. 

The little room in which A and I live is 

quite bare. But some of the others contain 
quaintly beautiful things. One a portrait of 
some portly Frenchman ; another a great wal- 
nut wardrobe; here a chair; on a wall a long 
mirror set in a heavily carved gilt frame. 

Beneath my second-story window lies a 
long garden set like a soft gem in between 
two mouldy, crumbling grey walls. One finds 
beautiful dreams seated in that window as he 
watches the sun in the early morning thrust- 
ing golden shafts through the purple shadows 
of the trees, or while, in the evening, he sees 
the haze, molten yellow in the sunset, cool and 
fade again into blue. 

So, surrounded with such beauty, we had 
laughed uproariously upon our arrival when 
the soldiers billeted in town hinted at air raids. 



[91 ] 

Monday evening — cloudless and perfect — 
did pass without a single menacing sound as 
I sat smoking in the window high above the 

garden, and A pumped his heart out on 

a big accordion. 

Tuesday night, I turned in at dark. My sleep 
was so deep that not even a dream had come 
before a bomb fell somewhere down the street 
with a terrific, ringing crash. The house shook 
and swayed. As another shock came, I barely 
missed a nasty face-cut from a pane of glass 
which fell tinkling over me. Little chunks of 
plaster rattled down to the floor. Outside, 
some one had slung up a machine gun in the 
street before the house, and mingled with the 
bomb roarings, its futile little tappings came 
clattering up as the house began to sweep full 
of stale powder smoke. 

Twenty minutes of much unveiled terror 
passed, before we were left again in quiet. 

On Wednesday evening, presuming that 

the raids would be continued, C , P , 

and I climbed a hill above the town to see 
what we might of the bomb flashes when 
they came. It was lovely there on the hill- 
side in the dew-damp grass and sweet clover 
with dusk shaking down on us, and warm, 



[92 ] 

big stars sparkling out. Far over, all down 
the pink line of the west, shells streamed a 
long course. Came a faint thump from a siege 
gun; three seconds, four, five, the faint swish- 
ing sigh of the shell rising to a low scream; 
five seconds more of tapering to a breath; then 
the sharp roar of explosion. A little river of 
mist was creeping down the valley to wrap 
the grey old houses in a glimmering silver 
target. 

At about eight we heard the first queerly 
distinctive pulsing of a Boche motor. I do not 
know what the others heard or thought through 
what happened. But as the machine passed 
over us came a wet whistle and — oh, on top of 
us burst a black fountain all squirming with 
crimson fire. I started up. Half crouching in 
a stagger, I crumbled flat from a second bomb 
that halved the distance of the first. I could 
hear nothing, and it was like being dead and 
cut ofT from the world with your body still 
working. Then we ran and ran. It was horri- 
ble fighting up the hill in the dark, long loose 
grass tangling in your legs, crazy knobs of 
earth flinging you down, rotten smoke burn- 
ing your lungs, you trying to breathe and your 
heart and lungs shaking out sobs, and down 



[93 ] 

the valley shock ringing on shock, the night 
cut open and bleeding red with the fire of rip- 
ping mitrailleuses. 

Finally, gasping and strangled, we hunched 
flat beside some bushes. With three motors 
droning above us, with the nasty nerve prick- 
ings that buzzing mosquitoes give a lightly 
sleeping man, we lay still ever so long. 

By and by the sounds grew fainter. With 
the bushes on one side and the ridge of the 
hill merging black into the purple sky on the 
other, we lay dreaming up at the stars. Lit- 
tle melting night sounds rose from the dry 
brush and soft grass, and slowl}^ our mind 
chaos quieted as one floats first from a night- 
mare into a lovely dream and wakens then 
to normal consciousness. 

C had just returned from an eight-day 

Paris leave, and after he had offered a few 
general remarks about War, we dined all over 
Paris on fat beefsteak and vintaged champagne 
and waffles with syrup and peach shortcake 
and ice-cream. Afterward fell a long quiet 
when each thought the others were asleep, 
and we were all wondering and thinking. 
You can think a lot of things out beneath the 
stars, stretched on an overcoat, warm and 



[94] 

comfortable in heavy clothes and a long 
woolen scarf. ... I see that soldiers in action 
forget politics and the reasons for War. In 
their world of tense emotions they have so 
much to do with fighting that universal ideas 
seem to be cut off, and the whole War ap- 
pears to them only in terms of personal fate. 
To outsiders, perhaps, a soldier's ideas and 
his personal God of Fate seem narrow; they 
feel, perhaps, that we should forever be hold- 
ing the magnificent ideal for which we are 
fighting. But when your body is crawling 
with lice and no single day holds the cer- 
tainty of another to follow it, you can't think 
much of the policies that sway nations. Your 
self is so much in evidence that you can't get 
beyond it. But somehow a man's motives are 
better and cleaner in War than during the 
humdrum of Peace. And so I think when it's 
all over our present self-centred thoughts will 
turn of themselves back to a normal broad- 
ness, and strengthened by these present les- 
sons in suffering and unselfishness, will make 
for all of us a stronger, happier world. 

After nearly four hours the raid began to 
break up about midnight. A welling-out roar 
from the motors came up the valley accom- 



[95] 

panied by four quick crashes over the village, 
and the jerking machine guns. Then a sud- 
den choked splutter from a rapidly slowed 
motor. For a black half-minute, a machine 
cut a lazy circle above us, spidery and dis- 
tinct in an awful, visible menace. ... In 
other moments of danger, with some respon- 
sibility resting upon me, I had not felt the fear 
which came in that space of cowered help- 
lessness. — One might not feel it many times 
and keep his nerve unbroken. It is not nice 
to wait thirty seconds to be blown to pieces. 
This morning I went back up the hill to 
where the earth was gashed by two raw scars, 
each fifteen feet across and four feet deep. 
From a small tree beside which we were ly- 
ing when the bombs struck, I measured forty- 
five paces to the nearest hole. A queer sen- 
sation comes when you see things all spread 
out in the daylight; close about the hole lie 
great chunks of rock and steel which thin out 
until at forty-five paces remain only pebbles 
and tiny scraps of metal. But ten feet from 
where one lay, he stumbles over a piece of 
eclat, eight inches long, with edges more hor- 
rible than the blade of a saw. It 's a queer 
old war, with a most vivid sense of humour. 



[96] 

Thursday evening 
As I finished writing this afternoon, and 
supper-time camej the grey clouds which have 
hung all day in the sky, closed together to 
fall in a long autumn rain. You at home will 
never know the joy that rain can bring. 
Avions cannot fly in the rain. So there was 
a perfect setting for the peace and glory of 
the letters. 

Now, free from every danger, and my whole 
heart tumbling and surging with the happi- 
ness my letters brought, I am squeezed in 
with some of the others about a huge fire- 
place that is yellow and snapping with the 
fragrance of burning fir boughs. A little bit 
ago some one organized a section orchestra 
and the room is echoing with the counter- 
points and fugues and variations of a dozen 
wailing combs. It is good to be stretched out 
on the floor writing to you. In the ease of 
physical relaxation and mental peace all the 
confusion of thought in one's mind grows 
clear, and the sensation crops up that this is 
the closing of one chapter of living. After a 
night of long, fresh sleep I shall awaken to- 
morrow knowing that the first part of War is 
over 3 that, terrible as fighting may be, it can 



[97] 

bring nothing which one is unable to bear; 
and that sometime we will be home. 

Now, I am off to bed. Warm and comfort- 
able between blankets, a few minutes will 
pass of listening to the drowsy slapping of the 
rain against the house, until soon the rain and 
the guns and the last shivers of the fire will 
melt together and grow dim, and the chant of 
the trees will be left alone humming out the 
body of one's dreams. 



THE END 



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